Dodgers will rely on young pitchers for starting depth

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The Dodgers do not plan to have Walker Buehler in their rotation to start the season and will handle him with care, but he’s clearly someone they envision as part of their rotation for years to come. (Photo by G Fiume, Getty Images)

GLENDALE, Ariz. — The Dodgers saw a need this winter and added someone with more than 100 major-league starts in his past.

Mark Prior was hired as the team’s new bullpen coach. The team’s starting pitching depth, on the other hand, is made up of young pitchers with far less experience than Prior’s 106 big-league starts in his five seasons with the Chicago Cubs.

Five pitchers who each made at least 24 starts for the Dodgers last season are penciled in as this year’s rotation – Clayton Kershaw, Rich Hill, Alex Wood, Kenta Maeda and Hyun-Jin Ryu. But the Dodgers used 16 starting pitchers in 2015 and 15 in 2016. That dropped to 10 last year, but they used the 10-day DL as a waiting room, frequently parking starters there for the slightest infirmity.

Gone from that group of 10 are Yu Darvish and Brandon McCarthy with their combined 313 career starts. Now, the six players behind the projected starting five have a combined total of 41 big-league starts under their belts – 16 each for Ross Stripling (who might wind up in the bullpen) and Henry Owens, and nine for Brock Stewart (another bullpen candidate). Top prospect Walker Buehler, Wilmer Font and Dennis Santana have never started a major-league game. Twenty-one-year-old lefty Julio Urias is a greybeard by comparison with 20 big-league starts. But he is not expected back from shoulder surgery until, most optimistically, late in the season.

That number swells if Tom Koehler’s 133 big-league starts are included. But the Dodgers plan to have him pitching out of the bullpen in a prominent role.

But Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman says he has no concerns that the lack of experienced starters on the depth chart makes that an area of vulnerability.

“No,” he said. “I think if you look on the position-player side and the young players we’ve kind of broken in over the past three, four years, we need to start doing that with our starters and get to a point where one or two spots are taken down by our good young pitching and let them have a runway to kind of develop.

“I do think this year will provide some of that for our guys to have an opportunity and a softer landing. Then once we get through this season, we’ll have a better sense of who we can pencil in and count on as we start spring training next year.”

The Dodgers’ desire to maintain a payroll below the competitive-balance tax threshold this season (and qualifying offers attached to unsigned free agents like Lance Lynn and Alex Cobb) might be keeping them from adding a more seasoned starter to the current group. But Friedman insists the Dodgers “will be in good shape” because “there’s a lot of guys who from a talent perspective we really like.”

Buehler is at the top of that list. But the Dodgers are not planning to have Buehler in their rotation to start the season and will handle him with care (as they did the past two years with Urias). Buehler had Tommy John surgery soon after he was drafted in 2015 and has thrown just 103 innings total as a professional.

“It’s not as much a hard innings number. That’s just not how we operate,” Friedman said of the limitations on Buehler. “It’s much more kind of evaluating as you’re going, seeing how guys are bouncing back and making it much more specific for each guy.

“It’s certainly something we’re going to be very mindful of. He’s not in the place yet where it’s just kind of off our radar and just go out and pitch every fifth day and see what happens. So we’re going to monitor it and see where he’s at. But hopefully we can get a healthy jump from last year and continue to move him up to a point where he can put 200 innings on his body year in and year out.”

NOTES

All of the Dodgers’ position players have reported on time, according to Roberts. The first full-squad workout is Monday. … Right-hander Ross Stripling (one of the seven Dodgers who got married this offseason) was given permission to leave camp this weekend in order to attend a friend’s wedding.

Bill Plunkett has covered everything from rodeo to Super Bowls to boxing (yeah, I was there the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear off) during a career that started far too long ago to mention and eventually brought him to the OC some time last century (1999 actually). He has been covering Major League Baseball for the Orange County Register since 2003, spending time on both the Angels and Dodgers beats.